Huh. Apparently the problem with the world oil market is there's too much oil on the market. At least that's what Libya says. They might cut their oil production because of this.

Or maybe they just can't produce as much oil as they used to....

Libya May Cut Oil Output as Market Is Oversupplied, Ghanem Says

Sorry, it's The Netherlands that uses DD-MM-YYYY, not Norway.

So much ~ma to Pico and Sue.

Sorry, it's The Netherlands that uses DD-MM-YYYY, not Norway.

Do you know what India uses?

Much ma to Pico.

Shir--I hope the evening is as wonderful as the dress!

Sorry, MacOS doesn't have an Indian locale defined.

India uses dd-mm-yyyy (I suspect that the punctuation varies a good bit for any of these locales, but the date is definitely day first).

I think you're outta luck when it comes to translating your dates, tommyrot. It's just us and the South Africans holding out.

Oh, Sue, I'm so sorry.

I think the native American accent of which you speak (and indigenous Canadian too) is more likely to be a cadence.

True. I find it hard to distinguish between a cadence and an accent--once I've pinned it, it's pinned.

Today is crinoline day. That's the only way I'm going to get through it's length, despite having discovered I don't have the right drivers in Vista for my new scanner so I can only adjust like three settings, and having burnt my hand on the iron, and already being late which means I should be sitting here typing but I'm hoping Photoshop hasn't actually hung and I can finish what I partially installed the scanner for in the first place. Why do I suspect my phone has a part to play in resolving this tech issue? The world is too complex.

Actually, there's also a factual basis for this. Mixed-race Indian men had very strong incentives to marry "down" the racial hierarchy -- that is, to marry a darker-complected mixed-race woman, or a black or Indian woman. Whereas mixed-race women could be "saved" or "civilized" by marriage up the hierarchy. This would explain why all the "tragic mulatto" stories of decades past are about women aspiring upwards, never about men. It wasn't totally universal, but there are strong gender-hierarchy implications in race-mixing in the US, especially in the 19th century. (Hint: a lot of the same stereotypes applied to Indian men in the 18th-19th C. are the ones applied to black men in the late 19th, early 20th C., i.e. "they will rape your lily-white daughters and create terrible 'confused' children.")

And Nutty brings up the point I was going to bring up. Additionally, you had frequent points in the colonization of North America where there were more white men in a given area than white women, but not so much the reverse.

(Disclaimer: I'm a white girl, but it seems that not all my ancestors were. Those that weren't were, in fact, female. No princesses, however. Everyone was dirt poor and rural.)

We have no Indian princess stories. They'd be hard to sell on my mother's side, which consists of Very Pale People. We do have a French princess who ran away with a coachman story. Since there's pretty good evidence that the only French part of the equation was Huguenot, it seems highly unlikely.